20160304

Program for the March 4, 2016, OAS meeting

How Many Intelligent Species Are There in Our Galaxy

By Roy Kimbrell

Summary:

How many
civilizations are there out there? In 1950 Enrico Fermi noted that
the Sun is a typical star, and there are billions of stars in the
galaxy that are billions of years older. Some will have Earth-like
planets, and some might develop intelligent life. Some might develop
interstellar travel. Even without interstellar travel, the Milky Way
galaxy could be traversed in a million years (150,000 ly wide by
180,000 ly long). Therefore Earth should already have been visited
by extraterrestrial aliens. Fermi saw no convincing evidence of this,
nor any signs of alien intelligence anywhere in the observable
universe. He asked, "Where is everybody?"

Frank Drake in
1961 penned the Drake Equation to stimulate scientific dialogue
concerning this question. I thought I'd take a stab at making an
estimate along different lines. I assumed that the Earth is typical
of a planet that will foster intelligent life. I then looked at some
of the constraints on the development of intelligent life such as
where an Earth-like planet might exist in the galaxy, what kind of
sun might harbor an Earth-like planet and what the sun's population
is in our galaxy, how long it might take before intelligent life
might arise, and what kind of disasters might befall an intelligent
species (based on our own experience on Earth).

In doing this I
encountered the studies that others have made into this same
question. Some are simulations of a galaxy and some of habitable
planets. Several are studies of the Kepler database of planets.
Some of these results will be discussed.

Speaker Bio:

I'm a writer. Two books on Amazon Kindle and another being written. This talk is a development of ideas I presented at Barcamp - Omaha last August. I used a specific number of civilizations in our galaxy in my books - which are fiction. But I needed some basis for this number.

Left the government aerospace business (Northrop Grumman) a few years ago after about 30 years of hardware, software, and system development.